Does AAP Protest Too Much?

Arvind Kejriwal and team give their signature dharna politics a break and return to their desks, but the simmering hostilities with the Lt Governor—and the Centre—are far from over.

- Shougat Dasgupta

Now that a truce has been reached between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the bureaucrats who ostensibly work for them, will it be business as usual in Delhi? That is, a resumption of simmering hostilities between the elected government and Lt Governor Anil Baijal—a central government stooge, the AAP maintains? It had been an hallucinatory nine days, seeing Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal stretched out on a sofa in an antechamber of the L-G’s residence. Seeing deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and health minister Satyendar Jain embark on hunger strikes. A melodramatic gesture, critics sniffed, as both men were rushed to hospital. Seeing a variety of leaders, from Mamata Banerjee to Chandrababu Naidu to Pinarayi Vijayan, Sitaram Yechury, Akhilesh Yadav and political neophyte Kamal Haasan, express their support for Kejriwal, making him relevant again at a time when he was in danger of becoming a running joke—the Chihuahua forever nipping at the Great Dane.

AAP has claimed these nine days as a victory. Columnist and social commentator Santosh Desai describes the sit-in as a “risky but strategically sound move”. It turned what had been an “attritional cold war”, he argues, “into a hot war”. In other words, AAP forced a lancing of the boil. According to Atishi Marlena, a senior AAP functionary who has done widely acclaimed work in improving Delhi’s schools, the so-called dharna was “important” as a means to highlight how the “L-G’s office is being misused by the Centre”. She believes a significant proportion of Delhi’s voters understand that “the AAP government’s work is being disrupted, that though we have been effective, we could have been exponentially more effective had we been free of impediments”.